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I learned something the other day on way to school. Someone once wrote a book titled to the effect of Everything I Ever Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten. After this event, I would change the title just a little. Here is my title: Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I was Taught by a Kindergartener. In this case, she was still a preschooler! I am grateful that sometimes God chooses to humble me by the acts and words of children. In this particular case, I was taking my granddaughter to her preschool and while riding along she saw my journal lying on the console between the front seats. She began flipping through the pages that chronicled my thoughts over the last decade, nothing truly profound I am sure and in no particular design to the writing, just thoughts. My idea, when I began it was to try to leave behind some small insight into how I see my world. Until explaining its presence to my granddaughter I am not sure that anyone else in the world even knew it existed. It is just something to help hang on to the precious times… and that is where the lesson began.

As she asked questions about the small leather bound book, I noticed she was intently reading it (upside down). A few moments later, I glanced back to notice she had put pen to blank page and had started to write. I immediately told her to stop. She looked back at me perplexed. It was a book, after all, made to be written in. She was writing on a blank page. I began to explain that this was a book that I write in on things that are important to me. That is when the lightning hit! What could possibly be more important to me in the years ahead than a reminder of one morning, just me and my granddaughter; a 4 (almost 5) year old teacher of old men? And too, when my children and grandchildren peruse what I have written some day after I have left this earthly realm, how many smiles will those half dozen or so lines, so intently written on that page (still upside down), bring to their readers? I corrected myself and told her she could use one page to chronicle her thoughts as we rode along in the car.

True to her form, she did just that; only stopping momentarily to ask me how she would know where to find the book once I was in heaven. I assured her that she would find it but, not satisfied with that answer, she pressed further. Finally, I told her it would be in my desk. It wasn’t until I was very specific about what drawer it would be in, that known, she was content. She had no difficulty with the idea that I would be in heaven and she would go on with life. She said as she finished her page, “Papaw, when you’re in heaven and you finished your story, my Mommy and Daddy and me will keep writing in here to tell the rest of the story.” (Paul Harvey would be proud of her, I know I am!)